Maarten photographs the same neighborhood every day for a week, but always within the same 1-km radius. By narrowing his lens, he is able to broaden his view of a single area and actually see more within it.
His first neighborhood exploration was de Pijp in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Maarten hopes to expand this project to multiple cities around the world. It has been a visual exploration of photography of special settings combined with people: street photography with limits, where his interest lies in reflections and transparency to reach a level of abstraction that gives the everyday scenes a poetic quality.
“Apart from video art and installations, I like to photograph my surroundings. It is a visual exploration of what I like to call photography of special settings combined with people. I can find beauty in a lot of things, but like simplicity. By limiting myself in time and location, I want to push myself to the limit, explore my creativity and train my eye to find beauty in everyday life.”
For this project he has shot every day for seven days in a radius of 1 kilometer around the gallery Qlick Editions. Each day he picked, together with renowned street photographer Eric Kim, the best or most interesting shot as pick of the day, which were printed in a large size.
Rots started in an empty gallery which has progressively filled up throughout this past week with the selections and the large pick of the day prints. He has written comments next to his work so the whole process has become transparent, giving the public an insight in his working process, thoughts and creative mind.
Every day the gallery was open for visitors to come by and witness the process of the project via GPS, his blog or live at the gallery as Rots was making his selections.
Maarten’s work is fascinating because he plays a lot with reflections and transparency, elevating what is actually street photography to something more abstract. His photos have a layered quality that give the impression of a an overlap in reality, when they are actually single shots. [Official Website] [Qlick Editions]
